We'll have a sizzling summer with Miss Strallen in a new stage version of Top Hat

Summer Strallen plans to wear the trousers when she and Tom Chambers re-create the routines Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made famous in the movie Top Hat.

A stage version of the classic American screen musical goes into rehearsal on July 4, which seems appropriate. Summer will play the part of Dale Tremont and Chambers (a former winner of Strictly Come Dancing) will play Jerry Travers, the roles created on the silver screen by Rogers and Astaire.

In real life, Astaire ruled the dance floor and often had Rogers in tears. But Summer joked it would be the other way round for the stage Top Hat. ‘Tom and I get on so well, we’re going to make a really good partnership,’ she said.

Hot to trot: Summer Strallen as Ginger Rogers

‘I’m very bossy, so I’ll be Fred in the relationship. He was a bit of a battleaxe to Ginger, and dictatorial, and they had many spats.

‘Tom and I won’t be like that because we get on. But I’m a brigadier’s granddaughter, so I am bossy by nature, which I think Tom might quite like.’

In any event, Summer stressed Top Hat is not a biography.

‘I’m not playing Ginger Rogers playing Dale Tremont — I’m playing Dale Tremont, and Tom’s playing Jerry Travers,’ she told me.

Carefree: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, pictured in a scene from the 1936 film Swing Time, put in hours of practice for their dance scenes

However, she acknowledged the title is so ­synonymous with Fred and Ginger that it’s impossible to simply gaily divorce them from the scene. Their dance numbers appeared effortlessly joyful but, as Summer noted, that came about because they were so well drilled.

‘They rehearsed those dance numbers till they knew them backwards. That’s why they seemed so carefree,’ she said.

Ted Chapin, president of Irving Berlin Music, which with the composer’s family oversees his estate, has given director Matthew White, choreographer Bill Deamer and producer Kenny Wax permission to use the numbers featured in the movie.

These include Cheek To Cheek, Top Hat (White Tie And Tails), No Strings, Isn’t It A Lovely Day To Be Caught In the Rain, and The ­Piccolino. The stage team has also been allowed to use additional songs such as Let’s Face The Music And Dance and I’m Putting All My Eggs In One Basket, which were not in the film.

Top Hat will begin a national tour in August in Milton Keynes, then move to the Birmingham Hippodrome, the Mayflower in Southampton and the Lowry, Salford Quays, before heading to Plymouth, Norwich, Canterbury, Edinburgh and Leeds.

If Berlin’s heirs like what they see when Top Hat dances up and down the country, they will give ­consent for it to transfer into London.

A Fiennes choice for a Bond star

Licence to thrill: Actor Ralph Fiennes

Ralph Fiennes is being lined up as one of the stars of the next James Bond movie.

I can reveal that his Hollywood representatives are in discussions with the producers and director Sam Mendes about a role in the film that so far is known only as James Bond 23.

Mendes, who will direct Daniel Craig as Bond and Judi Dench as M, has spoken to Fiennes about ­taking on what has been described to me as ‘a darkly complex’ role.

Fiennes is not interested in the usual run-of-the-mill action ­picture, but he was intrigued when he was told of Mendes’s ‘revolutionary’ plans for Bond 23.

‘It’s the first of a new generation of Bond films, and the ideas Mendes has push the film into darker territory where the characters are modern, mature and challenging,’ a film executive in Los Angeles connected to the production told me.

At the moment, the situation with Fiennes is purely at the ­discussion stage.

I was told Fiennes was approached because ‘the part is one of extreme complexity and only an actor of great ability and dexterity can take it on — and Ralph’s name is top of our list’.

From what I can gather, it’s not the same part that’s being talked about for Javier Bardem.

I’m told a couple of other major names are being courted for roles in the picture.

At one point Kevin Spacey was spoken to about doing Bond 23, but he was alreadly gearing up to play Richard III, which Mendes is directing at the Old Vic from June 18.

Gemma Jones (so good in Woody Allen’s movie You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger) will also appear in the play, which is part of the Bridge Project, a transatlantic collaboration between the Old Vic, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Neal Street ­Productions, the ­company run by Mendes with Caro Newling and Pippa Harris.

Fiennes has just been filming the role of the prime minister in David Hare’s BBC film Page Eight.

Before that, he filmed his final frame as Lord Voldemort for the last Harry Potter movie. Next weekend, he travels to ­Germany, where his much ­anticipated film version of ­Coriolanus, featuring Vanessa Redgrave and Gerard Butler, will have its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.

Mendes and Fiennes are old friends, by the way. The actor led the director’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of Troilus And Cressida more than two ­decades ago. The play also ­featured Simon Russell Beale — who also may pop up in Bond 23.

Last December, I revealed that Kate Winslet will move to London while her estranged husband Mendes is directing Bond 23, bringing their children with her.

War Horse advances on all fronts

War Horse is the only West End drama that plays to 100 per cent capacity every week. Even the matinees sell out.

Latest figures reveal it commands an advance ticket haul of well over £3million — phenomenal for a show that’s three years old and has been watched by almost a million ­people, if we include the National, where it originated, and the New London, where it’s running now.

The millionth person to see War Horse is expected around the middle of this month.

A galloping success: The brilliant puppets in War Horse

The play is based on the Michael Morpurgo novel about a horse named Joey which is sold and sent to the front in World War I.

I remember going to the first preview and watching actors move the puppets of the horses — created by the Handspring Puppet Company — and even though I knew they weren’t real, I was totally transported.

So much so that I almost cried out ‘No!’ when Joey got caught up in barbed wire.

It was clear to me that War Horse was going to be huge, but I had little sense of how huge.

Nick Starr, the National’s executive director, decided the show should transfer. Michael Linnit, who runs National Angels, the outfit set up to work with the National and assist them in exploiting their productions, helped finance the transfer to the New London, where the play’s joint directors Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris re-staged their production.

As Linnit explained: ‘There are a lot of productions that are ­brilliant for the National — but that doesn’t mean they have a life beyond the National.’

He cited reasons ranging from availability of stars to a show being too big to transfer.

But War Horse fitted the bill so well that it’s booking at the New London well into next year and is sending back a handsome profit to the National. An American production of the show is in rehearsal in New York, with previews beginning at the Lincoln Centre’s ­Beaumont Theatre on March 15.

The National’s Nicholas Hytner wondered whether War Horse would replicate its success in the U.S., but my sense is: yes it can.

Americans love horses and the nature of heroism. I wanted to buy another copy of Morpurgo’s novel recently and three of the stores I tried — one in LA and two in NY — had just sold out.

If the directors can keep their story-telling as simple as they have in London, then War Horse should gallop on for a long time.

However, prices at the Beaumont are steeper than they are in London. One of the shrewdest moves here has been to keep the top ticket price under £50.

The Evening Standard’s British Film Awards are on Monday night. On the best films list is Another Year, The Illusionist and Neds.

The King’s Speech has Colin Firth up for best actor with Riz Ahmed of Four Lions and The Social Network’s Andrew Garfield. Brenda Blethyn, Kristin Scott Thomas and Tilda Swinton are the best actress contenders.

Now Sierra's gearing up for Rebecca

The producers of the musical Rebecca are holding a rehearsed reading in New York with Sierra Boggess. It will be Ms Boggess’s first professional gig after she plays her last performance in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Love Never Dies on March 12.

The musical version of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel had been expected to open at the Shaftesbury Theatre, but the show’s designers discovered an ancient stream running beneath the theatre.

The planned set needed to rise up from the bowels of the building. But when workmen drilled a test hole, they hit water.

‘I didn’t want to create a hole in London and end up being buried in it myself,’ joked Ben Sprecher, one of the producers behind Rebecca.

Now, he and his associates are looking at other theatres in London but the suitable ones — which include the Adelphi — are occupied. So Broadway theatres are also on the agenda.

Sprecher says the plan is to begin production in the autumn — in either London or New York — and the hope is that Ms Boggess will star.

However, she might also do She Loves Me for director Stephen Mear at the Chichester Festival Theatre.

At the New York reading next month, Ms Boggess will read the part of ‘I’, Carolee Carmello will read Mrs Danvers and Hugh Panaro will read the part of Max de Winter.

The nominations for the Laurence Olivier Awards are revealed on Monday at a reception at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

Julian Bird, the new head of the Society of London Theatre (SOLT), wants a splashier ceremony — which is great because for too long the Oliviers have been virtually secret. I’m thrilled that Bird and SOLT president Nica Burns are devising an improved show for March 13 at the Drury Lane, with a red carpet and television coverage.

I hope lots of stars support the evening and that it’s lively — and not the end-of-the-pier pudding of years gone by.

Watch out for...

Matthew Kelly and Gerard Kearns, who star in Tim Firth’s comedy Sign Of The Times, which begins performances at the Duchess Theatre on March 7.

It’s fair to say the play has been 20 years in the making. Firth told me he got the idea when he was on a train leaving Scarborough and spotted two men putting up letters on a building and began wondering how they got their jobs.

The play examines the notion of people who thought they had a job for life.

‘It’s not the case any more,’ said Firth, who has enjoyed huge box-office success with Calendar Girls, which continues to tour around the country.

Director Wilson called Sign Of The Times a play about mentoring.

‘It starts with the older man helping the young one, and later those roles are reversed,’ said Wilson, who produced the long-running West End thriller The Woman In Black.

Another brilliant performance: Lesley Manville is teaming up with director Mike Leigh for a National Theatre production

Lesley Manville, who will be joined by Ruby Bentall in Mike Leigh’s new (as yet untitled) play, which runs at the National Theatre in September.

Lesley gave one of the best screen performances in recent memory in Leigh’s film Another Year.

Mystifyingly, it was overlooked by Oscar voters, although Bafta gave her a best supporting actress nomination for the part.

Anyway, a smashing consolation, of sorts, for Lesley was to be invited to supper by Warren Beatty.

The old smoothie sidled up to her, in full view of his wife Annette Bening, and told her he was thrilled by her acting in Another Year. Beatty said ‘it was the best of the year, after Annette’ — referring to his wife’s performance in The Kids Are All Right.

Terence Rattigan’s Less Than Kind, with Sara Crowe, Michael Simkins and David Osmond, which is a hit at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London, where it runs till February 12.

Other plays in Rattigan’s centenary year include Flare Path with Sienna Miller and James Purefoy in Trevor Nunn’s production at the Theatre Royal Haymarket from March 4; and Cause Celebre, starring Anne-Marie Duff, Niamh Cusack, Freddie Fox and Jenny Galloway, which is being directed by Thea Sharrock at the Old Vic from March 17.

It was Ms Sharrock, of course, who staged the sublime production of Rattigan’s After The Dance at the National last year.